January 22, 2013

Management of
content proliferation is important of course, but in evaluating content
effectiveness it is also important to consider the goals of the site. All too
often we hear that “reading content” is a site goal. While that may be true if
you’re selling advertising, it is generally not true for content rich sites. (For more on this, you’ll want to read next
week’s post on Mission Critical Content)The purpose of content is to drive
an action or a task, such as a purchase, event registration, donation,
newsletter sign up, lead generation form completion, using a selection wizard
and so on.

Measuring Task
Completion gives you an initial sense on whether the web site is effective in
getting visitors to complete the tasks on your site that are associated with
business goals. Once you establish Task Completion Effectiveness, you can use
this as a benchmark to determine whether you content management actions are
working. The goal: raise the site’s Task Completion Effectiveness percentage.

Calculation:
Expressed as a percentage based on the total number of task-completion page
views divided by total number of site page views. A higher percentage indicates
more successful task completion.

Calculation Notes:
The completion page for each task will need to be identified, such as a “thank
you” page or a submission confirmation.

Example: During the month,
there were 500,000 total page views. Of this total number, there were 10,000
task-completion page views. This equals a task-completion effectiveness of 2%.

In the chart below, you’ll
notice that we’re using “visits” and not “page views” as a baseline metric.
Why? This report was done in Google Analytics. GA bases its metrics on visits
and can not correlate events to page views. While we could have created filters
to obtain the page view data, we opted to go with what GA does best.
Using visits as an alternative still provides a reliable measure of task
completion effectiveness. If we had done this in SiteCatalyst, we would have
been able to correlate the events to page views.

In this example, the TCE has gone down slightly over a 3
month trend. Next steps should include reviewing the page view totals of the
task confirmation pages to see which ones are experiencing declines, and then
determining what factors are influencing the drop. Is it because there has been
more content added to the site, thereby “diluting” the completion page views?
Less marketing and acquisition driving towards task completion? Or, perhaps
tasks are seasonally driven? Like any good high level “health” report, the TCE
will drive additional questions that require you to do some analysis and investigation.

As I mentioned in my first post, this metric becomes even
more effective through segmentation of audiences by geolocation, subdomain,
visit frequency, and acquisition source.